I did a 2007 Year in Review post last year. I remember it being lots of fun looking back and thinking about all the awesome work that the community did. Good thing I only remembered the fun part, and forgot how hard it is to just pick a few things to write about, or I wouldn’t have started this post!

Community Happenings

As usual, LoCos continued their hard work promoting and supporting users in their areas. The Community Council delegated LoCo-related duties to the newly formed LoCo Council. Over the year, the US Maryland Team, Colombian Team, US Indiana Team, El Salvador Team, Peruvian Team, US Arizona Team, Ecuador Team, Lithuanian Team, Tunisian Team, Greek Team, Romania Team, and Hungarian Team became approved LoCos.

Many, many release parties were held for the 8.04 and 8.10 releases. Over 60 were planned for 8.04, and over 70 were planned for 8.10.  Early reports from some release parties can be found in the UWN. The German Team held their annual UbuCon (pictures). The French Team 8.10 release party was attended by 4000 people! If you ever hear Christophe Sauthier, leader of the French Team, being called 4K, now you know why

It is always good to see LoCos recognized for their hard work. Ubuntu Finland received the Finnish LUG 2008 award, presented by the Minister of Communications. Ubuntu Indonesia was recognized by their government for spreading OSS. Several LoCos also got on TV to promote Ubuntu and themselves: Italian Team (video), Nicaraguan Team (YouTube), and Danish Team.

With a burgeoning number of community participants applying for Ubuntu membership, the Community Council created three regional boards to handle applications: EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Asia and Oceania, and Americas. Over a hundred new members were recognized for their continued hard work!

The forums keep growing like crazy. There are over 700,000 registered users, 6 million  posts, and almost 1 million threads!

Two Open Weeks were held this year. They provided a great exposure to the different parts of the community. Everything from derivatives to new upcoming features. Logs of the sessions are available on the wiki.

Inspired by Dell’s IdeaStorm, probably one of the most talked about sites this year was Brainstorm. When Nicolas Deschildre released a report about Brainstorm activity up to the end of the Intrepid release cycle, there were 22,000 registered users and almost 15,000 ideas submitted.

The Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity for the creative types to get involved. Winners have their audio or video submissions included in every Ubuntu install. If you want to see some cool stop motion work, check out the video winner. Competition for the 9.04 release has already started, the submission deadline is 6 February 2009.

Development

The MOTU corner of the community went through some changes this year. Richard Johnson (nixternal) and Emmet Hickory (persia) joined the MOTU Council. A new type of developer was added: Contributing Developers (or Universe Contributors). These are developers who will maintain the universe repository while not needing upload access.

Similar to Open Week, two Developer Weeks were held to help participants familiarize themselves with the various development groups and packaging techniques.

In conjunction with LoCos, a Global Bug Jam was held from August 8th to 10 August (read Daniel Holbach’s review). The purpose of the Global Bug Jam is not only to fix bugs, but to make sure bugs have enough information, making sure bugs are categorized properly, and sending bugs upstream as needed. The next Global Bug Jam will be 20 February to 22 February 2009. Get your LoCo involved!

The 5-A-Day project got off to a great start this year. It is a great way for everyone to help with bugs. No coding skills are required! Anyone can help confirm bugs and link bugs in Launchpad to upstream bugtrackers. There are also nice tools to show off the five bugs you worked on in email signatures and blog posts.

To make the development process more helpful, discussions, interviews, and tutorials can be found at http://videos.ubuntu.com and YouTube.

Cody Somerville took over Xubuntu leadership this year, kicking it off with the Strategy Document. Good to see Xubuntu kicking butt again!

2008 was quite the year, looking forward to an even better 2009!

These are some notes from the November 2008 Team Reports:

• To fix bug 272826, the Community Council decided to get rid of the term Ubuntero and generalise the Code of Conduct.
• The Documentation team updated the help website with 8.10 information and a new theme.
• Training Team is working on updating Ubuntu Desktop Course material from 7.10 to 8.04.
  • Several screencasts have been created and the Knowledge Base has been updated to help new users contribute.

• Austrian Team has launched a new forum at www.ubuntu-at.org.
• Danish Team  had their biggest release party ever.
  • Appeared in National Tv (DR1), a 20 minute show about Ubuntu and Open Source.
  • A Danish podcast is being planned.
• Berlin Team had a great release party: Daniel Holbach’s Summary
• Greek Team published first issue of its e-zine: Ubuntistas
• Zimbabwean Team had its first release party.
• Ubuntu Romanian Team presented 8.10 in Targu Mures.
• Ubuntu 8.10 Japanese Remix CD was released.

If your team hasn’t done so already, please fill out the December 2008 Team Reports.

In the middle of November, the wife and I were planning to go Jamaica for a week. Unfortunately, my mom and dad fell sick, and we spent the week taking care of them.

My dad had symptoms of sciatica. At night, the shooting pains in his leg wouldn’t let him sleep. Since then, rest and medication has almost completely made the pain go away. He is now weening off the pain killers. With some physical therapy and knowledge of what he can and can’t do (like no more bending over to pick up anything), dad should be able to prevent any future attacks.

On the other hand, my mother, who sprained her ankle and tore a ligament, isn’t healing as fast. Unfortunately, its her own fault. The doctor put a boot on her to keep her foot and ankle from moving around too much. She isn’t supposed to take it off at all. But noooooo! My mother is one of those people who always has to be doing something. Cooking, cleaning, running errands. She can’t sit still for more than 10 minutes. My mother refuses to wear the boot (she complains its constraining even though thats the point) and tries to walk several times a day, causing her foot to swell up. The doctor gave her crutches, but she complains it makes her feel like a gimp and refuses to use it. Basically, its going to take her at least one more month to heal properly.

After that week, my in-laws and sister-in-law came down to visit for Thanksgiving. Now, my in-laws are really nice people. But spending that much time with family, is a bit tiresome. The wife was pretty much stressed out, and for anyone who is married or in a relationship, if the wife ain’t happy, no one is :-P.

That was followed by UDS. Anyone that has attended UDS will tell you that its extremely fun and entertaining, but not exactly relaxing.

After UDS, I was pretty much burned out. Plus we knew we had more family visiting for Christmas.

So we decided to take some time off and head down to Cancun.

Nothing but eating and sleeping for a few days. We did take a day trip to Chichen Itza to check out the ruins.

The Great Ball Court was amazing. The field is 545 by 232 feet. Rules of the game aren’t exactly known, but it must have been fun with so much space.

Anyway, our visiting relatives left yesterday. I’m looking forward to a slow start to 2009!

Josh and I recorded the show with a HD camcorder, so viewers will definitely see improvements in the avi. There are still plenty of kinks to work out, so bear with us.

Some topics discussed on episode #15:

• UDS (most of the show is about this)
• 4000 people at French Team release party
• Cool new System76 laptop
• New Ubuntu Hall of Famer: Alberto Milone
• etc, etc, etc

As usual, thanks to all the folks who stopped by the Ustream.TV live feed. We dent and tweet out when we are about to stream live. If you want to know when that happens, follow http://twitter.com/ubuntupodcast or http://identi.ca/ubuntupodcast.

It was great to finally meet Dan Trevino and Chris Crisafulli from the Florida Team.This UDS was pretty fun, but they made it even more entertaining!

Kenneth Wimer took the picture:

After sessions, a pizza joint around the corner, Pizz’a Chicago was taken over:

After sessions Wednesday, some went to the Computer History Museum:

Babbage Machine:

Google’s first production server:

Dinner:

Tony Whitmore has been conducting developer interviews and posting them on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/ubuntudevelopers. There are only a couple so far from UDS Jaunty, but there should be more soon!

During the UDS introduction, Mark Shuttleworth mentioned that there are Amazon EC2 images of Ubuntu coming. While others have created Ubuntu images for the various releases for a long time, its good to see that it will be officially supported.

Mark also mentioned there will be work done for using Ubuntu to build a cloud infrastructure (a la Eucalyptus). Very cool!

Some other Mark highlights: there will be a focus on quality, boot performance, improving battery life, and more suspend/resume improvements. Work will continue on Mobiln (seems like more vendors are jumping on board) and there will be a Mobilin remix coming out with or right after Jaunty is released. There should be an ARM release for 9.04 as well. All of Ubuntu will be in revision control, so every application can be branched. Also, nightly builds in the form of PPAs will be available for select apps.

Update: For ways to listen in, check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDSJaunty.